LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Spring 2010)

I do hope that we all can keep in touch, be it on Facebook, Twitter, or email. This has been such a great, inspiring class and I look forward to hearing about all the great things you all will be doing! If anyone has occasion to visit L.A., please stop by UCLA to see me!

Best wishes to everyone, for a wonderful summer and a fulfilling career!

Vicki ♥

Boy, I am seriously going to miss this class!  I'm thankful for Ryan's quick thinking in setting up the class Facebook page; without it, surely I would suffer withdrawals from missing this incredibly supportive, productive, and fun (!) group and class.

Another blog that I regularly follow is the Legal Informatics Blog.

We are now well into Week 14 of this class, and we've been provided so many great opportunities to read articles and view sites that illustrate library use of social software, both good and bad. Looking back on all that we've learned, I'd say the biggest contributor for failure in library implementation of social software is the "if we build it, they will come" mentality.

Since we're on the subject of social media in libraries and learning institutions, I thought I'd share as my extra resource for the week a recent study published by the publisher Pearson. The study was conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group in collaboration with New Marketing Labs and Pearson, and involved a survey of nearly 1,000 faculty members throughout the United States in order to measure the use of social media by professors in higher education. Notable findings included the following:

For my extra resource this week, I highly recommend Jennifer Preece and Ben Shneiderman's article "The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation," which was published last year in AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction.

My community dynamics paper examines the role of the newcomer in online communities and ways to motivative newcomer participation in a community--this topic, of course, ties closely in with the concept of anonymous users and lurkers.

This week I consider the question: What do you think is important to consider before you choose the technology you're going to use for an online community? I touched upon this in my extra resource post, in which I summarized one of the chapters in Joshua Porter's (2009) great book, Designing for the Social Web.

For my extra resource this week, I'd like to recommend a chapter titled "Design for Ongoing Participation" which appears in Joshua Porter's (2008) Designing for the Social Web (the book is available electronically in the King Library's Safari Books collection). This easy-to-read chapter provides many good suggestions regarding steps that can be taken to ensure ongoing participation in an online community and to avoid "social network fade" (p. 104).

I'm sure all of us have encountered responses to community forums like Yahoo! Answers when doing a basic Google search, and thus, based on the quality of many of the responses often given, would agree that services like Aske Metafilter and Yahoo! Answers do not pose a threat to the role of the librarian. While I concede that services like Yahoo! Answers can sometimes be great for answering basic, personal questions, they are less reliable for discipline-specific or scholarly research questions. To demonstrate this, I performed several searches using general keyword searches.